The Time I Met the Old Man from the Daily Mail
Or the time I dodged a dox but I had my face on the net at uni for a cray cray stunt
Prelude - Throwing Together an IRL Shitpost
Back when I was at my first year of university in 2017 I was approached by a 40 year-old man named Damien Pace to join the Liberal party. He’s a shadow figure in Australian politics with a wannabe status of influence within the party’s Hard Right faction (Major Ministers of influence being Peter Dutton, John Howard and Tony Abbott etc.) but he still never really left his Master’s degree at Macquarie and resorted to recruiting young neurodivergent people who were at least moderately interested in right wing politics.
This era of my life is packed with a heap of highly chaotic and humorous trauma which I met a lot of other highly online spergs and online culture and politics junkies. My views since moderated a lot from when I experimented with ideological boundaries like any true left wing creative always would, but this time it’s ironically outside of the boundaries which deranged and embarrassing arts and creative industry gatekeepers like your Abby Chatfields and Luke Turner of the highly embarrassing He Will Not Divide Us project that got Shia Le Beouff trolled into becoming a Catholic. See what fellow Substack writer Nina Power had to bizarrely endure to the point of the British Crown having to declare her bankrupt for being critical and mockingly satirical towards it.
Regardless here’s two memes which would sum up the period of mine with the aforementioned ‘Pacemaker’ as we called him.
I could write essays about this weird six year period of my life and the whacky adventures I had in it. But regardless, I imagine that you’d want to see a bit about what crazy things the club I helped found did as publicity stunts to provoke thought and discussion when I was exploring online movements and ideas abroad.
Spit, Glue and Polystyrene Walls
The debut we had at our breakout skit was to create a sister club to the Macquarie University Liberal Club in 2019 called the UNSW Conservative Club. We did it in true glamoured, flashy and eccentric fashion with a big beautiful arts and craft polystyrene wall and an Italian guy dressed up like Donald Trump, without even the need for a fake tan to make up the look.
This ended up with mostly fun and outrageous reception for the camp display. Mainly from Chinese and East Asian international students approaching “Donaldino Trumpione” for selfies next to the arts and craft display.
We knew this luck was short lived when a tiny pair of Lebanese and Armenian Australian girl friends approached us to talk about “kids in cages”. Another Lisa Simpson type (English-Irish) Aussie girl approached and told our mascot off for also “making jokes that hurt real people who have real experiences”.
The most amusing part of this whole day was the fact most of the people who told us off had the most conventional complexion hues that Australia has to hold. Even the our Caucasus Australian friends who visited (outside of the immature ideological finger wagging you see at uni you could see they were probably nice people).
We Ripped Off Steven Crowder Change My Mind
The shenanigans and antics continued with another ballsy marketing display. This was the Change My Mind table we piggybacked on with the surge of Steven Crowder’s popularity in 2019.
All it took was a picnic trestle table hire, a laptop and the chance we gabe our Donaldino Trumpione to choose whatever topic he wanted for the stall that morning provided it wouldn’t get us banned. He went to OfficeWorks, spent a couple dollars and printed the following sign which we unfurled.
Smack, bang and pow - we did it. We actually did it.
Right in the middle of a highly international university, on the steps of the main library with people passing by to go to study or grab a bite at the food courts. A dissident voice politely asking the public to debate the merits of reducing the volume of our migratory intake.
You’d actually be surprised but again it was a mostly pleasant take to begin with. We even made some close friends when some Australians from North Indian, Taiwanese and Lebanese Maronite origin approached us to have pleasurable discussion and to voice quiet agreement and commandment for our bravado.
Most of the traffic was taking photos of us, among them a student interning for the Daily Mail and a group from the Socialist Alternative dysfunctionally loud activist group (aka among Australian campuses across the board as SAlt).
The two girls from the Socialist Alternative post using an account related to educational quality improvement committees which was granted to them which they used as a front for making a scene. They posted the following with the photo they took of us (images ripped from the Daily Mail, who ripped it from Facebook):
The comments on the article and on our Facebook feed from the broader public were actually pretty supportive.
One older Gen X commenter the same age as some of the teachers we had at school commented:
It’s nice to see a multicultural group of students discussing pertinent issues of our time at university. Only mistake you guys made was not letting Steven Crowder’s Lawyers know.
Another staff member from UNSW I had a really helpful chat with about a class I had with an older tutor I had trouble understanding in a stats and numerical methods class once somewhat encouragingly commented on our post.
I am ready for you all have some INTELLIGENT discussions with people.
The Weekend it Turned Dark
We packed up our table at the end of the day and were none the wiser. The shout of “incel” by the dysfunctionals was heard behind us as we also passed their smell for several days of skipped use of any kind of conventional soap product.
The next few days were pretty normal and passed by without much different apart from some arguments which were clogging up the UNSW Discussion Group on Facebook. The campus fringe left were trying to push the line of “arguments about immigration have been used in the past to justify racist policies”. Which were about as strong as saying that any conventional state border and immigration policy used by any nation across the world for most of the 20th century and anywhere outside a Western language speaking country wouldn’t cop comparatively much flak for today. Just think about how countries like Japan, China, Korea, Thailand, India or Vietnam usually aren’t treated as harshly when they are restrictive with their travellers, guest workers and expats. Hell, don’t even ask the Arabian peninsula’s records on construction worker slavery (in that case they’re not allowed to leave once they’ve been blackbirded in).
Regardless to any of that, the ChristChurch shooting happened that weekend. Subsequently, posts were made aligning our club with the motivations of the shooter about every hour or two over the next two to three days.
It was tough enough whigging out at the fact some sperg on my feed shared the link to original livestream just saying, “Oh my god don’t watch this it’s horrible!” Then moments later people I wouldn’t ever want to associate with or know in his comments were circulating and dissecting the manifesto.
Channel 9 was circulating parts of the footage and a Senator which was elected on allegedly fraudulent vote counts in a regional Queensland seat issuing a press release blaming Muslim refugees for the shooting itself.
Parents of mine were then also sharing articles on the guy’s life in the lead up to the attack insinuating his depression and solo travelling of Europe following the death of his father was some kind of parallel to watch out for. It got genuinely fucked - if I may say.
That weekend took a lot out of a lot of us and we had lots of other good skits in the following months and terms which kept spirits high. But I’ll never forget how it turned and it was really a ticket to eventually take a step back from being front and centre in political stunts because of things like this happening even if we weren’t to blame for shit when ideologically motivated disingenuous nuts tried to tie us as average uni students with a penchant for mischief and creative humour into it.